He rose to fame as a Top 40 radio personality during the 1960s and 1970s, amassing huge audiences in places
such as Hartford, Connecticut, Cleveland, Ohio, Detroit, Michigan, and his hometown of Buffalo, New York. Reynolds is often
regarded as the originator of "shock talk radio", whose sometimes outlandish on and off-air stunts garnered widespread publicity. (The Four Seasons even produced a special radio jingle for the introduction of his daily radio show).

Joey Reynolds, friend Betty and Frank Minishak on "Black Carpet" at recent premiere of the Morton Downey film "Evocoteur" (Click)

He was the focus of a two-part series on The Oprah Winfrey
Show concerning talk radio personalities, on which more than a dozen of Reynolds' media peers paid
tribute to him. Moreover, he has been invited to speak about entertainment media at several radio industry conferences. During his time in Buffalo, he and fellow DJ Danny Neaverth recorded a novelty single entitled "Rats in My Room." Reynolds and Neaverth, on behalf of WKBW, were offered the
chance to bring The Beatles to Buffalo Memorial Auditorium on February 10, 1964, the day after the band had appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. It would have been the Beatles' first concert in North America.
Unwilling to risk the $3500 appearance fee for a Monday night concert, in the poor February weather, for an unproven band he did not expect to sell out the auditorium, the two declined the offer. It
was not until after Beatlemania swept the nation that they acknowledged that it was a mistake to not bring
them in. In the three years the band toured North America, they never performed a show in Buffalo.